Let's Start with a Bang: "Almost Transparent Blue"

As the boys would say, I might be blowing my load a little early here with writing about a book as crazy and obscure as "Almost Transparent Blue", but it's one of those books that has really stuck with me...but not for the reasons you might expect. Also, I felt like I should live up to my username a bit...and while this book isn't really "sexy" in my eyes...it sure has a lot of sex in it.

But before we get there, this book is plotless. I want to warn you of that right now, reader. It's also a bit confusing to read: it's all in first-person, and it's often hard to tell who is speaking because the author doesn't always use quotation marks. Very often, people speaking and thoughts are garbled together in the same paragraph. The characters themselves are often blended together; they have a few distinctions, but they never seem separate from each other. Honestly, I probably wouldn't have picked it up on my own, but it was assigned for a college class...and BOY is it a "college" book.

Almost Transparent Blue, by Ryu Murakami, is essentially about a group of Japanese teenagers living in Tokyo in the mid-70s. They do drugs. LOTS OF DRUGS. Also they have sex. LOTS OF SEX. I'm really not kidding. We're talking impressive amounts of both, and often at the same time. All described in excruciating detail.

Example (of the drugs. Read the book for the sex!):

Reiko pouted and glared at Okinawa as she took the leather thong and made a tight tourniquet around my left arm. When I made a fist with my hand, a thick blood vessel stood out in my arm. Okinawa rubbed the spot with alcohol two or three times before plunging the wet needle tip in toward the bulging vein. When I opened my fist, blackish blood ran up into the cylinder. Saying Heyheyhey, Okinawa coolly pushed the plunger, and the heroin and blood entered me all at once.  


"Hey, well, that's it, how about it?" Okinawa laughed. He pulled out the needle. In the instant that my skin quivered and the needle was gone, the smack had already rushed to my fingertips and hit my heart with a dull thud. Before my eyes there seemed to be something like a white mist, and I couldn't make out Okinawa's face very well. I pressed my hand against my chest and stood up. I wanted to take a deep breath, but my breathing rhythm was off and I had trouble doing it. My head was numb as if it had been beaten, and the inside of my mouth was dry enough to burn. Reiko took my right shoulder to hold me up. When I tried to swallow just a little saliva from my dry gums, I was filled with a nausea that seemed to rush up from my feet. I fell groaning onto the bed. 


That's in the second chapter. I won't even get into the intense orgy scene. This book actually forced me to stop reading because it was so graphic between the drugs and the sex. I'm not sure if I truly enjoyed this book and the effect the descriptions had on me, or if I was scarred by this book and trying to get others to read it gives me some sick pleasure...but either way, I would suggest picking it up at least once in your life. 


But seriously, the blurb from the Washington Post on the back of my copy of the book says "Bugs and mucus, cheesecake and semen, rain and runways-all lovingly described." Sounds awesome, right?


Also, the internet is a magical, magical place. Here's a pdf file of the book. Now you have no excuse. Enjoy!